John Morley and the "Fortnightly Review" from 1874 to 1882.

Abstract

Perhaps the most serious problem in scholarship concerning John Morley is the failure to explain the relationship between his religious temperament and his politics. My dissertation attempts to define this relationship through an analysis of how Morley guided the Fortnightly during the last half of his editorship from attacking the Christian creed and then the Anglican Church to tolerating a wide range of religious systems. Raised a Wesleyan Evangelical, Morley became an empirical rationalist and an agnostic at Oxford, but he retained his religious nature. Politically, Morley's religious temperament surfaces in his belief that society has a spiritual and moral foundation. When he began editing the Fortnightly, he viewed the Christian creed as the primary stumbling block to social progress. Believing for a while that Positivism and science could supply a viable alternative to Christianity, he published many theoretical scientific articles which challenged Christian dogma. But he came to realize that Positivism could not inspire a spiritual rebirth, and he grew increasingly wary of science, particularly its overspecialization. Morley thus transformed the speculative, iconoclastic scientific voice of the Fortnightly into a much more practical or technical one. Since, however, the journal's political contributors consistently approached social problems empirically, I have identified the Fortnightly's Liberalism as scientific. Once Morley recognized that science and Positivism could not answer man's spiritual needs, he was left with a loosely organized but deeply humanistic agnosticism. Because his empiricism never yielded a cohesive new religion and because he believed that society rests upon a spiritual and moral foundation, Morley never discovered a solid basis for his political thought and hence never developed an integrated political philosophy. As a result, he was forced to continue concentrating on single issues: after the Christian creed, the Anglican Church's control of education, later disestablishment. Following mid-1878, Morley became much more tolerant, publishing numerous essays sympathetic to religions of foreign l and s. Scholars, therefore, have erred in assuming that the Fortnightly remained on the radically pro-scientific and anti-Christian course which it took during Morley's early years as editor and which Edwin Everett's The Party of Humanity describes so well.